Hirdyz Emporium

Hard drive manufacturers are set to improve the speed, capacity, and power consumption of their drives by 2011. While this technology will benefit users of Windows 7 and other modern operating systems, Windows XP users may actually be facing a performance hit by using the new drives.

This technology improvement, called Advanced Format Architecture (at least by Western Digital), is mandated by an agreement of the International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association, which says that by 2011 all hard drive makers must sell drives using 4 kilobyte sectors instead of 512 byte sectors, the current default.

Let’s break that overly technical explanation into something simpler: Most hard drives on the market now, from the lowly 80GB drives to the hulking 2 TB Read more ...